Kernel panic from reformatted RAID? Can I salvage it?

Just ran into a weird kernel panic issue for the first time with my Mac Studio (full specs below). The one thing I changed right before this was to reformat an old G-Tech RAID; once I got it up and running the kernel panics started, an endless cycle of freezes, followed by a reboot with a pink flash. I've finally turned off the RAID and it seems stable, so I'm 99% sure that was the culprit but I need to see if it wakes from sleep okay. The panic report lists a "pci" error at the top so I'm assuming that's the RAID on that bus (it's not hooked directly to the Mac, it's daisy-chained from a Thunderbolt enclosure).

I have SoftRAID Basic installed and on every startup it kept telling me this G-RAID was going to fail. To be clear: it's an old, 2-bay Thunderbolt 3 model that I upgraded a few years ago with two WD 2TB SSDs. G-Tech (or I guess they're SanDisk now) told me they couldn't guarantee the unit would work because it was never meant to have SSDs in it, but it's old and I only use it to back up my main working RAID. I wasn't using SoftRAID until recently and every day it's telling me this thing is gonna fail. I asked OWC about it and they said maybe it's because I modified the unit with SSDs, but failure was still a possibility. They recommended I Verify the drives using SoftRAID -- but of course only the full version has that feature. So instead I pulled the drives and individually wiped them and reformatted as APFS, then recreated the RAID using Disk Utility. SoftRAID then wanted to take "ownership" of the RAID so I allowed that. At some point after that the kernel panics started.

Is the RAID a lost cause? I hate to scrap tech that still has life in it but it's probably causing these issues. Not sure how I can fix it, considering the Mac will probably panic and reboot before I can run any process on it. I do have other Macs (including an Intel MBP) that I could use instead.

Mac Studio M1 Ultra, 64GB, 2TB storage, Sonoma 14.7

Peripherals: OWC MercuryPro RAID, Blackmagic video card (Thunderbolt chassis) Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, Streamdeck, Apple Studio Display and HP 1080 display and G-RAID with SSDs.